Summer 2022. I was living in Venice Beach and had decided, due to the persistent badgering of a good friend, to visit a fortune teller. He told me it would be life-changing.… Me, ever the sceptic, but game for a laugh, said “alright”. Plus, the story he told me about the hedgehog, the bowl of milk and his grandmother was utterly compelling and, frankly, beyond explanation. The whole fortune-telling session was on zoom; I didn’t burn incense or have the frilly tablecloth but luckily it was recorded so I know what happened next really happened and wasn’t some fantastical fever dream. What Catherine the fortune teller told me made me roll my eyes. “I am not saying you are Cleopatra but somehow you share her story and are connected,” she said. Inwardly I scoffed. Clairvoyants never connect you to a serf in the field or a charwoman but always to some nobility. What the hell did I have to do with Cleopatra anyway? I was about to find out. Less than a month later, I got a call from a production company making Jada Pinkett Smith’s African Queens and was subsequently hired to direct four episodes of a drama-documentary on the life of the controversial leader. The joke was on me.
I hope it opens your heart to the idea that the world’s greatest leader was a non-white woman from Egypt
Cleopatra was for me an unapologetic, fearless, heroic icon of womanhood and everything I desired to be. She was an Egyptian Pharaoh, the last in a long line, and she was one of the world’s greatest strategic thinkers. But for many years now, the ethnicity of Cleopatra has been debated. I remember as a kid seeing the lily-white Elizabeth Taylor, with her iconic violet eyes, play her in the 1963 film. She cut quite a figure – I was captivated. But even at age seven, obsessed with ancient Egypt as many youngsters are, I knew the image was not right. What was this white woman, who I later learned was born in Hampstead, London, to American parents, doing representing an Egyptian pharaoh? It was unsightly, really. Was Cleopatra’s skin really white or was she, like me, a non-white woman who had been taught from a young age to hate her skin colour? Colourism had done a number on me (thanks to Disney and Snow White), but Liz’s Cleo was another nail in the proverbial coffin.
When I joined the production of African Queens for Netflix, I had one ambition in mind: to find the answers about Cleopatra’s heritage and release her from the stranglehold that Hollywood had placed on her image. Things were already tense: the production had not had an easy start. But I saw this as one of the greatest political roles a filmmaker could take on, armed with a four-year art degree and a PhD in storytelling and representation. After all, aren’t storytellers here to make the unknown understood? Little did I know how incendiary it would become.
We need to have a conversation about our colourism and the internalised white supremacy Hollywood has indoctrinated us with
Born in Iran, which I left during the Islamic Revolution, I was a Persian, and Cleopatra’s heritage had been attributed at one time or other to the Greeks, the Macedonians and the Persians. The known facts are that her Macedonian Greek family – the Ptolemaic lineage – had intermarried with the Seleucid dynasty that ruled West Asia. If anything, you might expect me to claim Cleo as one of my own. However, as the historians in the programme tell us, Cleopatra’s family had been based in Egypt for 300 years – quite a distance from her Greek / Macedonian / Persian ethnic origins. We also discovered that her mother’s ancestry was unknown, as was that of her father’s mother (her father’s nickname was: The Illegitimate). It is vital to know she is said to have spoken Egyptian (amongst many languages), one of the first of the Ptolemy who did, and like her antecedents she built temples to the native Egyptian gods which predated her dynasty. Cleopatra was eight generations away from her Ptolemaic ancestors. The evidence got me thinking. What was important here? Was the fact that Cleopatra’s own daughter, Selene, lived in Mauretania and also built temples to Egyptian gods, another clue?
First, it is vital to note that our current preoccupation with skin colour is a modern obsession. I had researched this while making my previous documentary, Tribalism is Killing Us, an essay film about the construction of the idea of race, unconscious bias, and othering. Until the time of the Victorians, when the British sought to place families and species in categories, the notion of race was a foreign one. No contemporary of Cleopatra, such as Cicero or Strabo, spoke of race in their writings in the way we see it today, or indeed any way at all. In fact, the idea of race is probably something Cleopatra, Caesar and Marc Anthony never thought about either. So, what of it? How would I be able to uncover, reimagine and explore the narrative of who she was?
Doing the research, I realised what a political act it would be to see Cleopatra portrayed by a black / mixed race actress. For me, the idea that people had got it so incredibly wrong before, that white women from Theda Bara to Monica Bellucci, Angelina Jolie and Gal Gadot had been slated as wanting to play her, meant we had to get it… more right. If Cleopatra’s mother and grandmother were Egyptian, then Cleopatra may have been darker than she had previously been depicted. As Professor Shelley Haley says in the series “Skin colour ranged from black to pale brown. Much like the people of Southern Sudan to modern day Egypt.” The hunt was on to find the correct representation, and Heather Basten, our casting director, was tasked with this tricky job. It took an absolute age. I have never seen so many casting tapes and attended so many auditions. I can’t discuss the behind-the-scenes debates as they are probably part of an NDA I signed a while back. I did realise that casting a more ethnically representative actress might set the cat among the proverbial pigeons, but I believed it would also, crucially, draw the pendulum back.
Why should beautiful brown girls around the world be deprived? Why shouldn’t Cleopatra be a melanated sister? Why do some people need Cleopatra to be white?
I became the target of a hate campaign – there was a Twitter storm of Egyptians claiming I was “blackwashing”
Today we are absolutely obsessed with whiteness. I must admit I am obsessed with it. The reason is that that we live in times where women like me aren’t figures of leadership; we live in a time where images of Rihanna dressed as Cleopatra are so shocking and rare that they hold real power. In fact, Cleopatra ran one of the largest empires ever of any leader, gender, race or religion. Of course, it makes sense for her to be claimed by whiteness. Egypt is on the African continent the last time I checked. Her proximity to whiteness seems to be what gives her value, and for some Egyptians this seems to matter.
I became the target of a hate campaign – there was a Twitter storm of Egyptians claiming I was “blackwashing” and “stealing” Egyptian history. Some threatened to ruin my career – which, I wanted to remind them, I was ruining very well for myself, thank you very much! For them, these arguments were well-rehearsed. It seemed some did not want to acknowledge Egypt’s connection to the continent of Africa. It was as if the patina on statues was being washed off to reveal that the true colour underneath was in fact… black. No amount of reasoning on social media, or sharing of images of statues, stemmed the tide of ridiculous comments. “Amir” wrote to me to earnestly from his bedroom in Cairo to say Cleopatra was Greek! Oh lawd. Why would that be a good thing to you, Amir? You’re Egyptian.
The irony of Egyptians writing to me to claim Cleopatra was white is not lost on me. I have seen this internalised racism before in my own Persian tribe. Egypt is not a monolith and there are depictions of Egyptians of many skin colours. Colourism is our modern preoccupation and why we find it easier to see a white Jesus than a darker-skinned Cleopatra. I hope we can move forward to more nuanced discussions. Immigrants to many nations around the world are likely to intermarry and integrate. After 300 years, I am sure we can safely say Cleopatra was and is Egyptian. She is no more Greek or Macedonian than Tom Hank’s wife, Rita Wilson. Or Jennifer Aniston. Both these celebrities are one generation from Greek.
For me, the story of Cleopatra is the story of a woman whose greatness has been long contested. I know the London production team at Nutopia, who took on this project, wanted it to be as historically accurate and conservative as possible. Historians and researchers and anthropologists were all consulted in the making of the show, including Professor Islam Issa who says the appeal of Cleopatra “is that everyone can imagine her in their own way. I imagine her to have curly hair like me and a similar skin colour.” None of us wanted to create mythologies about who she might be. Cleopatra needed to be wrestled back to her statehood and her prima facie case as a woman of colour, an Egyptian and someone who largely fought for her self-determination and her place as one of the world’s greatest rulers.
Ultimately, we had to cast somebody in the titular role. This started a very long debate that took almost until we started on set. You can imagine what handwringing and agonising were involved, but it was important for us to find someone who was unknown in the role, yet able to embody Cleopatra’s magnitude, beauty and strength. We found that in Adele James. I was glad I could work with a remarkable cast who were really dedicated to bringing our characters to life. And when I saw the first images of Adele as Cleo, I was shaken.
When we finally arrived in Morocco and worked on the sets of Gladiator, Lawrence of Arabia and several previous versions of Cleopatra, including Asterix and Obelix: Mission Cleopatra. I understood the responsibility I’d taken on as I built the Great Library of Alexandria on the Kundun set. Movies are magical spells. They enchant us. They tell us who we were, who we are and who we can be.
But as the shoot got nearer, I also realised the magnitude of this job. It was Ramadan. Our Moroccan production team was fasting. It was very complex from start to finish with only 21 days to capture four episodes. I didn’t know if I’d be able to bring the beauty and majesty and complexity to such a large story, but I knew it was important to find a way of telling the story with humanism and nuance. The last thing we needed was to repeat the myth of Cleopatra as a sexualised person, divorced from her womanhood and power. If you can imagine how complicated it would have been for Cleopatra to give birth to twins in ancient Egypt? I was glad we were able to hire an ex-midwife actress from Ouarzazate, so we could get the childbirth just right.
Did they really imagine that no one in Egypt in 54BC had dark skin?
The social media storm about my depiction of Cleopatra kicked off during the filming of some market scenes in Memphis (Southern Egypt), when, to my disappointment, one of my Instagram photos gained unexpected attention in Egypt. Some had mistaken a photograph of a market seller, who would have been in southern Egypt at the time, and no doubt would have been of a dark complexion. The reaction to the skin colour of the person in the photo seemed bizarre – did they really imagine that no one in Egypt in 54BC had dark skin? I found their comments particularly sad and objectionable.
Why hadn’t more people objected when non-Greek people had played Cleopatra before? Egypt didn’t seem to mind when the HBO series Rome portrayed one of the most educated, intelligent, sophisticated and powerful women in the world as a sleazy, dissipated drug addict. Where was the outrage then? Egypt doesn’t mind when Cleopatra is portrayed as a mindless bimbo, a plaything for men, a drug addict, an unpredictable sadist (remember her shooting a servant with an arrow in Rome?), but portraying her as black? Well…
The attacks came when no one had even seen the series or heard the historians talk about their research. I knew the debates would come; I just didn’t realise they’d start while I was still shooting the film. I must say it’s very unnerving to get death threats while you’re working on set.
The series is now edited and out. Amir, I hope you enjoy it. Even if you don’t fully approve, I hope it opens your heart to the idea that the world’s greatest leader was a non-white woman from Egypt. To me, this is something to be very proud of. We need to have a conversation with ourselves about our colourism and the internalised white supremacy that Hollywood has indoctrinated us with. Perhaps it’s not just that I’ve portrayed Cleopatra as black –but also that I have forced Egyptians to see themselves as Africans, and they are furious at me for that. I am ok with this.
Perhaps we need to understand that the story of Cleopatra is less about her than it is about who we are
Was Cleopatra black? We do not know for sure, but we can be certain she wasn’t white like Elizabeth Taylor. We need to think about the politics of why it bothers us so much. I hope I have been able to give us an image that can help redress the wrong that previous depictions have made; a necessary rebalance that can liberate our imaginations for the past. One where darker-skinned women can rule one of the greatest empires the world has ever seen.
Most of all, perhaps we need to understand that the story of Cleopatra is less about her than it is about who we are. It’s almost as if we don’t realise that misogynoir still has an effect on us today. We need better stories. And we need a world in which we can explore who our historical figures were without fearing the complexity that comes with their depiction. I am proud to stand with Cleopatra, and with the team that made this as we reimagined a world over 2000 years ago where once there was an exceptional woman, a sister, a mother, a warrior and a Queen who ruled. I would like to draw a direct line from her to the women in Egypt who rose up in the Arab uprisings, and to my Persian sisters who are today rebelling against a brutal regime. Never before has it been more important to have women leaders: no matter her origin.
Note: This is a full-length version of a short op ed piece that was published in Variety in May 2023
Tina Gharavi is a BAFTA-nominated filmmaker and professor whose work focuses on misfits, rebels and outsiders. Since 1998 she’s campaigned for “untold stories, unheard voices”; storytelling from the margins. She’s based on the coastlines of Newcastle, UK and Venice, California
